


How to Assassinate Someone for Fun and Profit

by Square Pudding (Square_Pudding)



Series: Demolition Lovers [1]
Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Bromance, Drug Use, M/M, Meet-Cute, Mention of Past Sexual Assault, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Trans Male Character, Turkfic, Violence, a surprising amount of pro wrestling, backstory fic, bro we are kissing now, dubiously consensual making out, is it unrequited pining if they're both in love but too clueless to figure it out, not hurt/comfort so much as hurt/revenge, partially resolved sexual tension, what if turks but they had a realistic amount of paperwork, what if your faves but they're even younger and dumber than in the prequel game
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-12
Updated: 2020-05-15
Packaged: 2021-03-02 20:48:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 19,447
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24143089
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Square_Pudding/pseuds/Square%20Pudding
Summary: Rude learns that Reno used to be one of Don Corneo's "brides."
Relationships: Reno/Rude (Compilation of FFVII)
Series: Demolition Lovers [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1798939
Comments: 39
Kudos: 123





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I'll add a few general content warnings in the chapter headers as we go, but so you have a general idea what to expect:
> 
> -Rape is alluded to but not depicted  
> -Other Corneo crimes are alluded to, including a brief mention of preying on minors (which he did in the original game, so,)  
> -Being trans is no big thing in this world because it's a fanfic and that's how I wanted it, but there are a few scenes that touch on dysphoria.
> 
> Thanks to Emma for the beta!

"You've heard the saying, 'People are promoted to the level of their incompetence'?"

Rudolfo made a noncommittal noise.

"Don't worry," the administrative assistant continued, heels clicking on the glossy tile as she led him down the corridor. "He's a good agent. He's just not really suited for... you know."

 _'You know'_ probably meant desk jockeying. Rudolfo had known to expect a certain amount of that, but the recruiter had said most of his hours would likely be spent in the field, on assignment. Turks weren't admin; they were a hands-on division. And usually those hands went around someone's throat.

That had been key to Rudolfo placing so well in the examinations, actually. He was good with his hands, and pretty good with people's throats as well. Between the high school boxing stuff and his stint in the coliseum, Rudolfo had a notion he'd probably been on Director Veld's radar since he was 17 at least.

"Before this he didn't even have a partner," the assistant went on, stopping at a doorway to swipe her keycard. They were entering General Affairs' Investigative Division, where Veld and the other senior Turks kept their offices. Tile gave way to black carpet, muffling the sound of her heels. "Or maybe he scared them all off. He'll have a tougher time of it with you, I bet."

 _This girl's pretty chatty,_ Rudolfo thought, then corrected himself: _woman._ He wasn't in the minor leagues anymore; Turks were polished professionals, respectable grown-ass adults in grown-ass suits who handled messes the corporate types didn't want to see.

Still, the woman -- _lady_ , that sounded better, classier -- talked more than she should. Trashing superiors where you could be heard wasn't really a good look. Even Rudolfo, so fresh off the street he kept tugging at his shirt collar every few minutes, could see this lady probably wasn't a 'culture fit.'

Saying that would take effort, though, so Rudolfo just grunted again.

The office was small, claustrophobic even for a single occupant, never mind the three that were in it now. There was a ratty desk piled high with papers, a lonely computer monitor (off), and a leather couch (surprisingly nice, but bearing the distinct imprint of someone who had taken to sleeping on it). What little space remained seemed taken up with junk and garbage: take-out containers, porno mags, a 9mm clip just hanging out atop a stack of reports like it was an ordinary paperweight.

And then there was the guy at the desk.

Most of the Turks Rudolfo had encountered since his orientation followed the Director Veld model: well-groomed, neatly-pressed standard-issue suits, a few personal affectations or scars but overall a bunch of sober-looking business types. Reno wasn't anything like that. He was young, for one thing -- possibly even younger than Rudolfo, who at 22 years was already one of the division's youngest recruits -- and he wore only the bare minimum of office attire, his shirt half-buttoned and his necktie nowhere in evidence. But Rudolfo's largest impression was of his partner's hair, which might charitably be described as looking like a clown wig that had had an accident with a lawnmower.

"Ohhh, it's the new guy." Reno was sprawled out in a high-back office chair, observing Rudolfo upside-down with insouciant disinterest. "What was your name again?"

Rudolfo told him.

Reno cackled. "What kinda fucking name is that? _'Rudolfo.'_ You sure you didn't make a wrong turn on your way to IT?"

Rudolfo glanced around for the administrative assistant who had brought him, but she seemed to have already fled. He was on his own, him with his grown-ass adult suit.

"No," he answered curtly.

"What's with the shiny head? You go bald from spanking your meat too much?"

"No."

"That all you know how to say?"

Rudolfo sighed. "No."

"You giving me lip now?" His new partner rolled out of his chair and onto his feet with liquid, feline grace, going for a Shinra-issue truncheon he'd left lying on top of a stack of urgent-looking papers. Past his half-done shirt Rudolfo could see taut muscle over Reno's wiry little frame. Scrappy, like a chihuahua. "You really gonna disrespect a senior officer like that? You're a rude motherfucker, aren't you?"

It seemed like this corporate life was going to suit Rudolfo just fine. He shrugged. "We gonna throw down here, or is there someplace in this building where I can crush you into a mat?"

Something wicked flashed over Reno's expression and his eyes gleamed, blue like a pilot light right before you cranked the gas up. "Oh, we're gonna get on real swell, Rude Boy."

Against all objections, the nickname stuck.

* * *

_'People are promoted to the level of their incompetence.'_

It sure seemed to be true. Reno might've been a good field agent, and a slippery bastard to square off against one-on-one, but he was no manager. If there was a department meeting he was supposed to be at, he was guaranteed to arrive late; if he replied to an email, either he forgot to CC _or_ he hit reply-all on a mass mailing, there was no in-between; if he needed to scan or print something, there were even odds he'd just fry the machine instead. Once, he held up Rude's paychecks for nearly a month just because the timesheets got lost on his desk somewhere.

He fucked up expense reports. He lost equipment. He routinely pissed off every last person in General Affairs, including Director Veld, and on the rare occasion he actually caught hell for it, the shit always seemed to roll downhill onto Rude.

"I'm still waiting on your AAR from the Icicle operation," Tseng told him, after the weekly all-hands meeting.

"I turned it in," Rude said. Five days ago, which was when he was supposed to, never mind that before this job he hadn't touched a keyboard in years and barely knew where to put his fingers anymore.

"Your half, yes. I need Reno's report as well."

 _So ask_ him _for it,_ Rude did not say. It wouldn't have done any good. This was just what they all expected him to do now, was clean up Reno's messes. Pick up the slack. Be a good Turk _and_ a good secretary, because Odin be damned if anyone in the division tried to hold their little problem child to account.

What he said was, "I'll get it to you."

So he pulled some OT and wrote it. It wasn't exactly onerous work, just copying over details from his own After-Action Report and tweaking the language a bit. He and Reno had been nearly joined at the hip for the whole length of the operation, so their accounts needed to line up anyway.

Tseng saw through this little ruse immediately, of course. He just also didn't appear to give a shit, and little wonder as to why. He was probably just happy to see Reno's name on something that wasn't a disciplinary hearing.

So Rude got used to writing two copies of everything.

* * *

He could almost take it in stride. Just part of the hustle, the pain of being a rookie in a division not exactly known for its great HR. One day he'd get a younger partner and be able to inflict all this same misery onto them, which was a sort of cosmic fairness.

But then there came the day where Reno just didn't want to do his fucking job.

"Got an errand," Rude announced, dropping the folder onto their overburdened desk. The piles were as bad as the day he'd first walked in. "Wall Market."

Reno was lounging back in his (their) chair again, feet propped up on a tower of unfiled requisition forms. He was painting his nails, a recent phase of his, little bottle of black polish held between his knuckles as he swept the world's daintiest brush over a thumbnail.

"Yeah?" he said, without glancing up.

"The don's not supplying enough product to R&D. We're supposed to lean on him a bit, remind him about the agreement."

Ugly business, but routine. The undercity was full of kingpins and slumlords working with the tacit permission of Shinra, because it was cheaper than committing real security forces. Don Corneo was the biggest and ugliest of those petty tyrants, as Rude knew well, but he still only operated by the grace of the adults upstairs. Not much to sweat over.

But Reno, genius speed demon Reno, who Rude knew from painful personal experience could take down guys twice his size without smudging his eyeliner, froze in his seat.

"You go," he muttered, resuming his nail work. His hesitation had been brief, so subtle that Rude would've missed it if he weren't so used to Reno's body language now. "Think I'm gonna clock out early today."

A hot spike of anger flared inside Rude, just for a moment.

"You got somewhere else to be?" he demanded.

Reno kept his attention squarely on his nails. "Was thinking about getting laid tonight. You can handle it, can't you, partner? It's just a milk run."

"Yeah, it's a milk run, so why do I gotta do it solo?"

Technically, Rude was still on his six-month new-hire probation, not allowed to act independently except with special dispensation from Tseng or above. It wasn't really a big deal; on away missions there was always the unspoken understanding that Turks would do what Turks must and figure out the justification for it later. But this was just a skip down-plate, not worth skirting the regs for.

"It'll get done faster if it's both of us," Rude said. "I can't talk to these guys."

"Gotta spread your wings sometime, boyo."

"You know I got no leverage with the don."

Corneo was bound to remember one of his former prize fighters, and even if he didn't, negotiation wasn't exactly Rude's strong suit.

Which was why, when Reno drawled out a dismissive "Not my problem," Rude finally lost his patience and just straight up banged his fist on the desk.

 _This_ caused Reno to start, his little brush skipping over the cuticle of his nail and staining the corner of his thumb. He gave Rude a venomous look through the candy-colored fringe of his hair.

"Listen, cueball," he said, so coldly Rude couldn't help feeling a faint chill up the back of his neck. "Nobody makes me do _shit_ I don't wanna do. You pulled this assignment, you handle it."

And that, seemingly, was that. Rude knew that if he wanted to, he was physically capable of picking his partner up by his skinny pale ass and hauling him straight out of the office as though he weighed nothing at all. If he acted fast, he could even do it before Reno grabbed that stupid cattle prod of his. But what would that get him in the end? 

So Rude took his grown-ass suit and went by his grown-ass self.

* * *

Don Corneo recognized him immediately, even through the shitty sunglasses he'd bought on the way over.

"Rudy, baby!" he was saying, buoying over to Rude like a weather balloon buffeted by crosswinds. When he got within handshake distance, he instead 'jokingly' swept in for a fake one-two punch to Rude's stomach, like he was greeting an old gym buddy.

For a moment Rude contemplated humoring him, pitching forward with an exaggerated _oof_ like he'd legitimately been staggered, but he didn't. The two security guards he'd dragged along were standing off to the side just a few feet behind him, watching every movement. So he held upright, arms bent behind his back, all the impassive stoicism and reserve expected out of Shinra's finest.

Corneo's smile faltered, but he rallied quickly enough. "Word was you got scouted, but I didn't know it was for the biggest game in town! How's the _high life_ treating you? Hee, did you catch that pun? High life!"

"Well--"

"There's no way I could snipe you back from Shinra's payroll, is there? The coliseum's been a desert wasteland since you left; it's all small-time bum fights and cage matches now. Nothing that pulls in the kind of crowds that _you_ used to, Rudy."

"I--"

"Hey, you still have that mean right hook?" Corneo put up his plump fists in a poor imitation of a boxer's stance, weaving cartoonishly left and right. He even provided the sound effects. "Heehee! My million-gil baby! We had to carry the other guy out with a shovel!"

"I'm here to talk about that," Rude said, seizing at the opening with faint desperation. "Not the fights; the clean-up."

Corneo's fists lowered by several degrees. "Now, that's just what I've been saying, Rudy, baby. Can't get fuel for the fire if no one's chopping down the trees, you understand?"

Rude, who hadn't seen a real tree in his life up until about three months ago, said that he did.

"So you see I can't really keep up with the demand, not without somebody good to help me with the supply. If your people were to send down a few shiny new tools, say, maybe a prototype or two, I could announce a new exhibition tournament, and then the bodies would just be _piling_ up."

"That wasn't the deal."

"Come on, baby. I know you never really had a head for numbers, but even you should see that--"

Corneo kept talking. And then he talked some more. Given carte blanche, the don would just vomit up words until he was blue in the face. He'd told a punch-drunk 19-year-old Rude the kind of shit no kid should ever have to hear, stuff he'd done to young women and the occasional boy that would get a person hanged in any other part of the world. And teen Rude could only sit there and listen to it. Even as a champ, he'd been at the bottom of Wall Market's pecking order, just another of Corneo's exotic pets.

But things were different now. He was a Shinra man, and not just any punk on the corporate payroll. The guards he'd brought with called him 'sir,' even though they were both probably older than he was. From where Rude stood now, the hill Corneo had crowned himself king of might as well have been a flaming pile of dogshit.

That's what he told himself, and yet here he was, getting railroaded by this small-time slumlord again.

"--sweeten the deal, say, maybe arrange it so that you boys got taken care of every time you stopped by," Corneo continued, with a playful elbow to Rude's ribs. "You seen the Honeybee Inn, that cabaret that just opened up down the street? The owner happens to be a very good friend of mine--"

What would Reno do in this situation? Probably he'd have set the tone from the moment he'd walked in, kicked over a large vase, announced to the whole mansion he was either going to walk out of here with what he wanted or he'd be walking out with Don Corneo's balls in a plastic bag. That sort of thing. You could get a lot accomplished with some well-placed theatrics and the right words.

But it just wasn't Rude's style. _His_ style was more grabbing Corneo's head like a melon and squeezing until it burst. And that wasn't really an option here either.

"You two," Rude said, looking over his shoulder at the Shinra guards he'd brought along, who straightened in anticipation of their first real order of the afternoon. If he couldn't solve things his way, the next best thing would be to hurt the don's wallet. "Go clear everyone out of the coliseum."

"Now, hold on a second," Corneo squawked. "Why're you doing that?"

"Because I can."

"We have a match coming up in a couple hours. My people need to be in there to set things up."

"Guess it's called off," Rude said, producing his gloves from a breast pocket. Behind him, the Shinra guards were already headed out the door. "Rats in the basement, gotta shut the whole place down. Public safety issue."

"Rudy! This isn't very funny."

"I'm not laughing, uncle."

All the kids Corneo brought up to fight in his coliseum or work in his parlors called him that. He insisted on it. Rude had meant to leave the name behind at the same time he left this place, but some things just stuck to the heel of his shoe, it seemed.

"Come on, now," Corneo tittered, still looking more confused than alarmed. "I just finished telling you the place is a ghost town, and now you're taking away one of the only bookings I've got left. How's that help your little researcher friends?"

"Nobody ever said the bodies could only come from the arena," Rude said. He finished fitting the gloves and made a practice fist to be sure they were on nice and snug. "You had options."

Every month Wall Market turned up a few unclaimed dead, usually homeless or addicts found strung out and braindead in some forsaken back alley. And every week there was a stabbing, or a shooting, or a mugging gone wrong. If Corneo wasn't making his quota, it wasn't for lack of supply; it was for lack of trying.

That, or he was selling the bodies somewhere else.

Corneo scooted back, his confusion finally giving way to full-on panic. He began to quiver in place, hands held up palms-out like he was planning to stop a speeding train by sweet-talking it.

"Rudy, baby! Please! We can work this out. You let me put this match on tonight, I'll cut you in on the winnings, how's that sound? I got a lot of my own money riding on this thing--"

There was this belief, common among Wall Market denizens, that Don Corneo was untouchable. That Shinra Company found him too useful to ever risk getting on his bad side. This wasn't technically true. Rude might not be able to kill him, but there were a lot of ways to make a guy's life miserable.

"Get out," Rude ordered, turning his back to the don as he headed for the office. If the door was locked, it soon wouldn't be. "You stay here one more second, your furniture's not the only shit I'm gonna break."

Corneo spluttered. "What--?"

"You're under audit."

* * *

"Would you tell me," Tseng said over the phone less than two hours later, "why I just received a call from Finance about you requisitioning fifteen of their accountants to visit a drug den in the slums?"

Rude, knee-deep in cooked accounting books and sheaves of paper from the remains of Corneo's desk, explained.

"An interesting approach," Tseng said, after a silence in which he slowly realized Rude wasn't going to elaborate. "Not what I would have expected out of you."

"Seemed like the most hands-off solution."

"We didn't hire you to be 'hands-off.'" Tseng sighed, and Rude could just about imagine him pinching the bridge of his nose. "Unfortunately, you most likely made the right call. No reason to bring down any further problems on our heads. I expect the director will be having a 'talk' with the president before the day's out."

Well, that sucked. But it wasn't really Rude's problem. His preferred method of dealing with this would've been powderizing every bone in Corneo's body like he'd been wanting to do for four years, and Rude didn't possess the imagination to think of how much paperwork _that_ would cause.

Probably enough to make 15 Shinra accountants, going through the don's rooms with cardboard crates gathering up a decade of financial records, seem like a conservative response. Rude tucked his phone against his shoulder to rifle through another stack of papers, most of which seemed to have to do with Corneo's brothels, not whom he was selling the bodies to.

"You said lean on him," he told Tseng. "I leaned on him."

"Generally we would opt for something less... protracted. But an up-to-date understanding of the don's activities has its own uses, so good work." There was not a trace of sincerity in those last two words. "Hand me over to Reno, would you?"

Rude's fingers paused between two brittle, ancient receipts that were either water bills or BDSM contracts.

"He's not here," he admitted.

"Reno's not with you?"

"Said he was clocking out early today."

"You went solo to Don Corneo's," Tseng said, his voice flat and lethal. "Without your partner."

A few beads of sweat had begun to form on Rude's forehead. Probably the room was just stuffy.

"Do I need to remind you it hasn't been six months yet?" Tseng asked.

Rude started thumbing through the stack of papers with renewed concentration, as though that might help with ending this conversation faster. "Couldn't convince him. It was this or sit on my ass all afternoon."

Tseng scoffed. "Why would _Reno_ pass up an opportunity to go to Wall--" He broke off suddenly, falling silent. "No, I suppose that makes sense," he said quietly, as though to himself.

Rude touched on something thick and glossy near the bottom of the pile. Photographs. About a dozen of them, all different women, shot from a high angle. They looked like they were sitting in the don's bedroom, which meant the camera was probably installed in his ceiling, and the women were... what, his "brides" that everyone heard about?

"Regardless, I want you both before my desk at seven tomorrow morning, do you understand?"

Rude bundled up the pictures to toss them back on Corneo's desk. Not his business, not his problem. The women would all be gone by now anyway, dead or wishing that they were.

"Yes, sir," he said.

As the photos slid and scattered on the desk, one of the faces hooked Rude's attention. He looked closer. The color of the hair was different -- presumably its natural shade, what some people called _'dishwater blond'_ \-- but the eyes, the angular jaw, the pout of the lips were all the same.

"On that note," Tseng continued, "take what you've learned and wrap things up for now. There's hardly any point in just one of you being there when he comes back with his lawyer."

What was this picture showing him, some kind of sting? But the kid in the photograph looked too young to be a Turk, maybe 18 at most. He sat at the edge of the don's vast bed, dolled up in some drapey, silky little number that accentuated curves that just didn't seem to belong to his body.

Reno had been one of Corneo's "brides."

Rude found himself averting his eyes. He shared a locker room with Reno, there was no mystery about what either of them looked like under their clothes, and Reno wore his shirts open without a binder often enough that Rude would have to be blind not to get an eyeful now and then. But this wasn't nudity; it was something way more intimate than that, a violation of trust that had very little to do with being partners and a lot to do with basic human dignity.

"Rude? I'd like an answer."

He fumbled with his phone. "Sorry, sir," he muttered. "Just found him."


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter warnings:
> 
> -Reno dysphoria feels.  
> -Reno insecurity feels turning into what's basically sexual assault in the workplace.  
> -Reno.

Reno looked more affronted at being awake at 7am than being reprimanded.

"...completely irresponsible, as the senior agent," Tseng was saying, hands folded together before him as he stared Reno down with marble statue indifference. "I thought perhaps having someone under your care would encourage you to shape up, but clearly that isn't what's been happening."

Reno dragged a hand through shabby, unwashed hair. There were dark bags under his eyes and he stank heavily of whatever it was he'd been drinking the night before, mixed in with the velvet scent of sex. It was very likely, considering how quickly he'd come to the door that morning when Rude went to retrieve him, that these were the same clothes he'd fallen asleep in.

"It was a milk run, boss," he said. "It shouldn't'a landed on a Turk's desk in the first place."

"On the contrary, a preliminary analysis of the data Rude brought in seems to indicate Corneo's been underpaying his licensing and land subscription fees for years now." Once in Midgar there had been a thing known as taxes, but they were a dim and distant memory. "His methods may have lacked your flare for the dramatic, but the results speak for themselves."

Reno shrugged, a long, drawn-out gesture. "Then it's fine he went by himself."

" _No_ , Reno, it is not fine. Rude is inexperienced. It was only by virtue of his particular background with Corneo that he had the first idea how to handle the situation without breaking anyone's fingers."

Strictly speaking this was not true. Rude had needed to crush the hands of several Corneo henchmen before they gave up the keys to some of the don's rooms. But that was the kind of low-grade casualty that never made it into the AARs.

"Lest you think you're getting off the hook here," Tseng added, turning his ice glare at Rude now, "your correct response in this situation would have been to come directly to me, not go cowboying off to the slums without real backup."

Rude straightened. "Yes, sir."

Beside him, Reno snorted.

"Here's your formal reprimand: Don't let it happen again. It was my error in judgment that the assignment was handed down to you in the first place; I should have taken into account Reno's history--"

 _"Tseng!"_ Rude had never heard Reno address the deputy director so informally before. He looked mortified.

 _"Nevertheless,"_ Tseng continued firmly. "Once again, your correct course of action was to come to me, not to shirk your responsibilities. You're both on desk duty for the rest of the week. You can appeal to the director if you like, but as one of you knows and the other will soon find out, Veld is not as permissive as I am." Reno squawked in protest, but Tseng was already losing interest in them, returning to a slim stack of paperwork on his otherwise pristine desk. "You're dismissed. Try to use this time to clean up that fire trap of an office."

Reno was seething before the door even swished shut behind them. By the time they made it back to their own office, his temper had escalated to a full boil.

"What the _fuck_ , man?" he yelled the moment they were inside. He took hold of Rude's lapels with both fists and shoved him back until he collided with the wall, using every inch of his not-too-impressive height to crowd into his partner's face. "It took you all of five seconds to run and tell a teacher, over an errand any security guard coulda knocked off in his sleep!"

"I don't cover for bullshit," Rude answered, brushing Reno's hands away with no real effort. He tried not to think of the figure in the photo, but it kept superimposing itself over the man in front of him, the bare shoulders and _slender throat and scraps of silk barely enough to cover his tender small breasts_. He cleared his throat. "You got history with Corneo, you shoulda said so up front."

Something must have betrayed him in his expression. His eyes maybe; he'd tossed those cheapo glasses on the ride home. Before him, Reno seemed to go several shades whiter. He knew what Rude had found.

The fear lasted only for a heartbeat before Reno's cheeks were flushing dark in anger again. He muscled his way into Rude's space once more, grabbed his necktie and yanked until it tightened harshly around Rude's throat, pushed right against his Adam's apple.

"You shut the fuck up," Reno said. His voice was barely more than a hiss, but his eyes were livid like the day they had met, a spark about to set off a towering inferno. "I dunno what you think you saw, but you delete that shit from your brain right now or I'll go in there with a knife and do it myself."

It was a pretty good threat, all things considered. Even at that moment Rude couldn't help feeling a trace of respect for the power Reno could command, the white-hot menace he could spit at someone who earned his disfavor. If Rude were another guy, it might have worked on him.

But Rude was Reno's partner; had been for more than three months at that point. They'd thrashed each other in the gym often enough to have a good measure of their respective abilities, and right now Reno didn't seem dangerous so much as exhausted. He was running on fumes, a prey animal that had run all night and didn't want to stop because Something might still be after him.

How late had he stayed out drinking and fucking whomever he'd found in arm's reach? How much sleep had he managed to get before Rude went to drag him out of his apartment at the asscrack of dawn, maybe a couple hours? Reno was a party kid, but not _that_ much of one. He was freaked out, either because the mention of the don's name just brought up that much trauma, or because he was afraid of what Rude would learn about him.

It was only going to make things worse, but Rude said, "I destroyed the picture. Nobody's gonna trace it back to you."

The punch was not totally unexpected. Pain unfurled across Rude's face as something popped in his nose, hot runny blood filling his nostrils. He put up some token resistance, half-heartedly blocking a few of Reno's follow-up swings, knowing that any real attempt to shut him down would probably just piss him off further.

"What picture?" Reno yelled. "You asshole, did you think there was only one?"

There was a brief hitch, as Reno realized what he'd just inadvertently confirmed. He rallied by driving a fist into Rude's stomach, then appeared flustered when this didn't cause him to double over enough to drive a knee into his face, so he did it again.

"Fuck you! You think I'm some victim, some sort of trauma bitch you gotta step in to save? I will rip your _fucking eyes_ out if you look at me like that again! Jam my stick into the empty socket and light your brain up like a solstice tree!"

Rude decided that was enough. He caught Reno's next fist as it swung toward his ribs. If Reno hadn't been strung out and exhausted, no doubt his reflexes would've saved him, but like this it only took Rude three moves to whip his partner around and shove him face-first against the door, arm twisted unkindly against his back.

"You're pissed off. I get that," Rude said, voice coming thick and heavy as the dam of snotty blood burst and started streaming down his upper lip. Probably Reno hadn't actually broken it, but the swelling was going to make getting through the rest of this week less than ideal. "You want backup next time you have to deal with him, I'm right there with you."

"Shut the fuck up!"

Reno might have been outclassed in weight and height, but he put in a valiant effort to struggle out of Rude's hold, twisting until his shoulder nearly popped out of its socket. He might actually do it to himself, he was so furious.

Rude pressed against his back to keep him pinned, and then immediately regretted it. All at once he was immersed in the rich scent coming off Reno's body, filthy with sex and sweat and clove cigarettes. Even through his maybe-busted nose, it hit Rude's senses like a ton of bricks. And that wasn't the worst of it. Reno's ass squirmed against his thigh, his shoulder blades pressed into his chest. Rude closed his eyes to try mentally shutting it all out, but it only made the problem worse, brought the memory of the photo up again, _pale long legs and a tiny waist_ \--

"Cocksucker, let me go!"

\--The photo wasn't Reno. Consciously, Rude knew that. Present Reno, the one he was crushing against their office door, scanned _'boy'_ through and through, all bone and electricity, in trousers a size too tight and a shirt opened so loose Rude could reach an arm around and cup one of his poky little tits if he wanted to--

Shit. He was hard.

"Fine! Fuck it! Just do it already," Reno said, his voice sounding raw and a little pitiful now, a kid coming down from a tantrum. He stopped trying to twist and contort himself out from under Rude and started to push back against him instead, pressing his ass against the front of Rude's pants and finding the firm bulge there. "Let's go, right here. I'm game. That's all you were after anyway, right?"

"Don't," Rude warned, but he'd ceded the high ground and he knew it. It wasn't just the memory of the photo turning him on, it was this right here, the feral energy radiating off his partner's body. He had an almost overpowering desire to pick Reno up and throw him onto the couch, or maybe bend him over their trash heap desk. "I know you don't want that."

"Fuck you, you don't know what I want."

Not to be seen as weak, if Rude had to guess. Not to be seen as a woman, which was easy, because he wasn't one. Not to be pitied or objectified on terms he didn't like. Not to have his partner stick his nose in his personal affairs, but it was too late for that one...

Rude made an executive decision and backed away, giving Reno some space to catch his breath. He released his hold on his wrist, and when Reno didn't immediately launch himself at his throat in response, Rude thought perhaps Reno had burned the fight out of himself already, that they weren't going to put the sound-proofing of their shitty office walls to any further test today.

That hope didn't last long. A moment later, Reno spun around and threw himself on Rude, arms wrapped around the back of his neck and legs locked at the ankles around his back. He pushed his tongue past Rude's blood-sticky lips.

Unbalanced, Rude staggered a couple feet back, his hands moving reflexively to support his partner's weight. Reno's kisses were more like bites, no affection to speak of, lapping and scraping with his teeth in a bid to get Rude to loosen his jaw and let him in. When this didn't work his mouth wandered up and licked at the drying blood around Rude's nostrils, closed his lips around the fevered, swollen flesh of his nose and _sucked_.

It was too much. Rude stumbled backward until the backs of his legs hit the couch and then he just sank down into it, allowing Reno's weight to settle in his lap. Hurting for air, he made the mistake of opening his mouth; Reno seized the chance immediately, shoving their lips together with such force that the shock of his tongue was secondary to the pain of teeth cutting his skin.

Finally, much more slowly than he'd like, Rude got his arm working and lifted a hand to the back of Reno's head. He threaded gloved fingers through thick, unkempt clown-red hair, got a good grip, and yanked.

Reno made a frustrated snarl, their lips separating with an obscene wet noise as Rude pulled his head back. A pink thread of blood-tinged saliva hung between their lips for a moment and snapped.

"Stop," Rude ordered. When Reno didn't loosen his arms around his neck, he reached up with his other hand and pried them out of their grip. 

"Whatsamatter," Reno said, slurring his words with a purr. His eyes were half-lidded and cloudy, more resignation than arousal. "Your partner not a good enough fuck for ya?"

Reno withdrew his arms and sat back, resting his full weight on Rude's knees. His hands went to the barely-decent front of his shirt and yanked, popping seams and sending several buttons scattering. His breasts came defiantly into full view, no binder or sports bra today, just two perky teardrop-shaped tits that looked like they'd fit perfectly in Rude's hands.

Immediately, Rude darted his eyes away.

"Such a fucking _gentleman_ ," Reno snarled. He wrapped his hands around Rude's face, nails digging into his cheeks as he tried to force him to look. "Pretending like you don't see 'em in the shower, like you don't try grabbing my ass when we fight. Probably whack it every night, thinking about how much you wanna see me all girled up and wrapped around your dick."

"I don't wanna fuck you," Rude rumbled, the first time he'd ever just straight-up lied to his partner.

"Bullshit."

"I wanna beat that guy till his organs pop and they have to send him to the morgue in a grocery bag." That part was true. "But it ain't happening."

At that, Reno fell quiet for a moment. The pinprick of his nails on Rude's scalp eased, though he didn't remove his hands just yet. 

He said, "What if it could?"

The question was ridiculous enough on its face that it took Rude a second to parse that Reno was being serious. He shook his head again, releasing his grip on Reno's hair now that it didn't seem likely he'd try to shove his tongue down his throat again. "They'd bust our asses for it," he said.

"My ass, maybe. You're the new guy; you just say you were doing what I told you."

"I'm not gonna do that."

And there was a bigger problem, which Rude had hoped he didn't need to point out, but Reno clearly wasn't playing with a full deck today. He jutted his head up the smallest degree, flicking his gaze to draw Reno's attention to the ceiling, or more specifically the camera they couldn't see but was obviously there. Bloody topless brawling on company time was one thing, but openly plotting insubordination wasn't going to fly.

Reno let out a low hiss between his teeth, finally getting the message. "Yeah, I'm kidding," he ground out, stealing another glance toward the ceiling before grudgingly starting the process of climbing off Rude's lap. "Nobody's doin' nothing. Just talking shit."

"Right," Rude said, trying to ignore the brief flash of disappointment at the lost warmth and friction. He crossed his legs carefully.

Reno flopped down on the couch beside him, arms folded over his skinny chest in a way that hid absolutely nothing at all. He was clearly still stewing, thinking so loud that it made the air in the room buzz. 

After a long, tense silence, he muttered, "Should getcha some ice for that."

Something that might possibly have been the distant cousin of a smile tugged at the corner of Rude's mouth. He tried gingerly touching the side of his bloated nose. There was the faint impression of actual teeth marks where Reno's 'kissing' had gotten overzealous. 

"I'll survive," he said. "Gimme your keycard."

"Why?"

Rude shrugged. He knew Reno didn't keep spare clothes around the office, and even if they did find something under all these piles of clutter he doubted it'd be in any condition to wear. "Thought I'd go grab your gym shirt for you," he explained.

"Oh, you fucking -- you really gonna start this again?"

"Quit taking everything like I'm trying to white-knight you."

If he said it like that, maybe it would make it less true.

* * *

The fact of the matter was, they couldn't touch Corneo. Maybe the day would come when Shinra policy toward undercity governance would change, but Rude couldn't see any scenario where they could just snuff the don with impunity, not unless the sky was falling.

That didn't stop Reno from thinking about it. Constantly, for the next four days, until Tseng finally freed them from desk work on Saturday evening for a security detail. By that point, Reno was so pent-up and restless that even guarding the president's son for a night while he tore through Midgar's fancier bars was a welcomed distraction.

"Cryin' shame, ain't it?"

Rude followed Reno's gaze over to the VIP table, where Rufus was knocking back some mako-green cocktail like it was water, two giggling companions of indeterminate gender pressing themselves against him like bats huddling for warmth. Another 'friend' was climbing over the back of his seat with a white tablet perched on the tip of their tongue, ready to worm it down Rufus's throat the moment he'd drained his glass.

"Daddy's the most powerful man on the planet, and his son's busy seeing if he can't get his brain cells down to single digits by graduation," Reno sniffed.

Rude hummed, which went unheard over the pumping synth track that the club was passing off as music. He didn't really think Reno had much of a leg to stand on there, but at least he hadn't shown up to work the rest of the week quite as messed up as that first night after the Corneo visit.

"Fucking company's going right in the shitter as soon as he takes over."

"Don't know about that," said Rude. Over at the VIP table, the kid (weird to think of Rufus that way, knowing they were the same age, but everything else fit even less) had accepted the offered tablet. Now he was trying to shove his whole face into the other kid's mouth, a waxy sheen coming over his skin as whatever drug he'd just taken started mixing with the cavalcade of foreign substances already in his system. "Some people're different off the clock."

"Like you?" Reno asked, side-eyeing his partner with a naked smirk. He could bitch and moan about this babysitting detail all he wanted, but Rude could tell he was back in good spirits, if only metaphorically. "What's your poison, Rude?"

"Don't drink much." Rude sniffed, felt a dull burn of residual soreness along the bridge of his nose. Healing materia had helped, but it still hurt like a motherfucker when he sneezed. "Why; you buying after this?"

"Me? I'm just a helpless little girl, I don't order my own drinks. I need a big _manly man_ to do that for me."

Rude had always found the best way to kill a fire was deny it oxygen, so he said nothing. He checked the time on his phone and found a missed call from Tseng.

"Gotta check in with the boss," he told Reno. "You good on your own for a few?"

" _Oh_ yeah," Reno said, arms folded and watching Rufus Shinra shotgun another drink, this one proffered by a pretty, natural redhead. "I could do this shit all night."

In a quiet corner near the bathrooms, Rude speed-dialed Tseng's number. It picked up on the second ring.

"Chocobo Two is sitting pretty," he said dutifully, right as the line connected.

"Good work," Tseng said, still somehow sounding crisp and alert even after Odin knew how many hours he'd been on call today. "How's Reno?"

Rude supposed Tseng had tried calling him first, found the idiot's phone off, and wanted to be sure he wasn't doing anything embarrassing for the department, like doing jello shots off a teen's stomach.

"Nothing unusual," Rude said. "He's sober," he added, for clarity.

"Will wonders never cease," Tseng deadpanned. "You have an additional assignment tonight. After the handoff, I'd like you to see your partner safely back to his room."

If you had a family Shinra usually put you in company housing, but most singles stuck to the dormitories, and Turks were single pretty much by definition. It got to feeling claustrophobic sometimes, living and working under the same steel roof, but at least it meant there was never an hour of the night Rude couldn't go burn off some extra energy in one of the building's seemingly countless 24-hour gyms. He'd needed a lot of that these last few days.

"Understood, sir."

"And stay there, if you can manage."

Rude's forehead suddenly felt a bit clammy. "Sir?"

But the rest of Tseng's call was all about the logistics of the handoff, what to do if Rufus was too incapacitated to walk, those kinds of things. All routine business. If he was hinting at some ulterior motive, Rude couldn't parse it.

When he came back from the bathrooms, he found Reno significantly less sober than he'd left him, chilling at the bar with a couple drained glasses at his elbow and a decent line of sight on Rufus. Rude took up position next to him and ordered a seltzer.

"You're so boring, partner."

"Treat me after work, maybe I'll ask for something else," Rude muttered, keeping their charge in his periphery while he drank. "Kid do anything interesting while I was gone?"

"He's got a tattoo in a place you wouldn't believe," Reno reported cheerfully. "How long till we pass him off to his next set of nannies?"

Rude was about to check his phone for the time again, but his ears tuned to the sound of breaking glass. He turned his attention back toward the VIP booth, in time to see Rufus Shinra pitching forward onto the table, his face a very not-reassuring shade of purple.

_"Shit!"_

Reno was always fast, but just then he moved like the space between Point A and Point B didn't exist. Rude caught up a second later, hauling the choking princeling up over the edge of the booth and onto his back, shoulders elevated to help his coughing.

"I don't know what happened," one of Rufus's hangers-on was wailing, presumably because Reno was an inch from snapping their arm. "One second he was fine and then he couldn't breathe."

"The waiter came over with a drink saying somebody at the bar had ordered it for him," another supplied. "I told him not to drink it, everyone heard me say that, right?"

Around them, several of the kid's "friends" were trying to press in closer for a look, flip phones out and record buttons at the ready. Rude shot out a hand and grabbed one, crushing its screen between his fingers as the owner cried out in offense.

"Poison?" Reno asked, finally releasing the poor squalling co-ed and crouching down beside Rude. "Or just fun times with chemicals?"

"Pretty fast for an overdose," Rude said, although he couldn't be sure. Some of these designer drugs rich kids liked to play with hit hard and quick.

Reno, who'd sobered through two beers in approximately 20 seconds, cursed and scanned the crowd. But there were just too many people, and the chaos was starting to infect the rest of the club now.

"Call Medical," Reno said, straightening up and flicking out his truncheon. "I'm gonna find that waiter."

The possibility of disagreeing with this course of action never even entered into Rude's head. Reno's eyes were burning with something he'd never seen before, something well on the other side of anger into unmarked rage territory -- only he was directing it at himself.

Their charge had gone down on their watch. For a Turk, it was the worst possible thing.

Rude kept Rufus's breathing steady till the Shinra EMTs arrived four minutes later. Tseng was with them.

"We'll take it from here," Tseng told Rude. "Go link up with your partner. Get the suspect in custody before the night's out."

It didn't take long to establish that Reno wasn't on the premises anymore, and neither was the waiter. Rude canvassed the area behind the bar and through the kitchens, shoving past confused staff and clouds of steam until he emerged into the back alley, cold sticky night air hitting his skin all at once.

He made a quick visual sweep of the trash bins and spotted an ancient fire escape ladder leading over a wall. Half its bolts had been wrenched out of the age-rotted brick, like somebody had recently been climbing it in a hurry.

Not trusting it to carry his weight after the abuse it had recently suffered, Rude backed up and made for the flat wall at a run. His boots and fingers found the gaps in the mortar easily and within seconds he was up onto the abutting terrace. From there, getting to the roof was trivial.

It wasn't often that Midgar's smog eased up enough to see the night sky, but tonight it was striking, full of pinlight silver stars and a full moon burning overhead. Against that backdrop, Reno's hair stuck out like a cherry-pink dandelion puff. He bobbed and weaved over the uneven rooftops half a kilometer ahead, in obvious pursuit of someone. Rude tracked the movement until he could make out the much darker silhouette of the suspect, further toward the plate division.

 _Must be headed for the train depot,_ Rude thought.

The Turk philosophy was never to work harder if you could work smarter. Reno was doing the necessary task of corralling their suspect toward a predictable endpoint, so Rude's job was to get there ahead of them.

He cut diagonally across the roof he'd climbed up on and shimmied to an adjacent building via the drain pipe, then hopped down onto the main thoroughfare and went into a dead sprint. Tires screeched in his periphery as he vaulted over lane dividers and dove into a nearby side street. Cutting up through an adjoining alleyway, he placed a quick call to Public Security's sector dispatch.

By the time their suspect was in sight of the train depot, there were five security officers fanned out around the gates and another two positioned at every escape route. It almost felt like cheating.

"How the fuck -- are you not even -- out of breath--?" Reno demanded of Rude less than a minute later. For all his dramatics, he was clearly only slightly winded himself. "Shiva, did you take a car over here or what?"

The suspect was face-down on the pavement, Reno's knee digging into their back. It sure looked like a waiter from the club, although the uniform was so badly torn and stained from their fancy moonlit rooftop escape that it was nearly unrecognizable. When they squirmed, trying to free an arm bent painfully beneath their chest, Reno responded by jabbing his electrified truncheon into the side of their neck.

"They say anything?" Rude asked, watching with disinterest as the suspect spasmed and then went still.

"Man, nothing! Motherfucker kept yelling they're innocent. Said they weren't even the one who served him; they just saw Shinra after them and split."

"Hmm."

A real overdose, then? It was possible. Hell, likely, given how Rufus was going at it in there.

But it didn't change their orders. If the brass wanted a third party to pin the blame on, that was what they were going to get.

Reno and Rude got the waiter in handcuffs and remanded over to Public Security before the clocks struck 11:00. Over the phone, Tseng thanked them both for their hard work and suggested they turn in for the night.

"Take Sunday off as well," he added, though that sounded less like gratitude and more trying to keep them out of his hair for a while. He had a busy 24 hours ahead of him, helping Veld liaise with Public Relations to suppress witnesses from the club and ensuring that Rufus's condition had stabilized. When he'd find time for a nap in there was anyone's guess. "And Rude -- I trust I don't need to remind you..."

"No, sir," Rude said quickly.

"Good. Then I'll leave you to it."

There was a bit more logistical bullshit after that -- there was _always_ more logistical bullshit -- but by 11:30 they'd been turned loose, and the night was still young.

Reno stuck his hands in his pockets and rocked back on his heels. "Sooo..."

"So," Rude agreed, producing a slim cigarette case and flip lighter from an inner pocket. He caught Reno's eyebrows shooting toward his crayon-colored hairline and hid a smirk. _'Some people're different off the clock.'_ "You still after that drink?"

Reno's face split into a lopsided grin. Hard to imagine this was the same guy that had wailed on Rude so bad a few days ago and then tried to force his tongue down his throat. "You still buyin'?" he asked.

He took a cigarette when Rude offered one, held it between two slender fingers and pursed his lips around the filter when Rude gave him a light. He closed his eyes on the first deep inhale, savoring the texture, his thick lashes shivering against his pale skin.

He looked... delicate. Just like in the photo.

It wasn't real, Rude knew that. Reno wasn't weak and he sure as hell wasn't innocent. But he _was_ starting to be important to Rude, in ways that were difficult to quantify and seemed to still be evolving.

The thought arrived in Rude's head unbidden, so fast and so sudden it nearly staggered him. But they were as far from any hot mics as they were liable to get, and the comedown from the adrenaline rush was still buzzing in their systems. It just seemed right.

"You really wanna go after the don?" he asked.

Reno hesitated. "Why?" he asked guardedly. "You in after all?"

"Yeah, actually."

Reno rolled the cigarette between his lips for a moment, thoughtful, like he was weighing whether to take Rude seriously or not. Debating whether Rude's help was necessarily something he wanted for this.

The moment ended, and Reno nodded with a sharp, silvery exhale. He stuck out his hand. Rude shook it.

"Partner," Reno said, and the word sounded brand-new, like it had been invented in that very moment, just for the two of them.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter warnings:
> 
> -Rape is described.  
> -Use of a reclaimed slur.

"G'nna fuckin'... castrate that shitbird."

"Mm."

"Pull his, fuckin', whatchacallit, G-spot out through his ass."

 _Prostate,_ Rude supplied mentally, and hated himself for the resulting mental image. He made another noncommittal noise and finished lowering Reno onto the bed.

"Gonna stick 'im in a chair... put a fuckin' sock in his mouth... an' let everybody he ever fucked with take a crack at 'im."

Rude was pretty sure Reno was stealing that bit from a movie, but didn't say so. He worked on tugging his boots off instead.

Tseng's special assignment to see Reno back to the dorms turned out to be a trivially easy task once they were both several drinks short of sobriety. As with everything he did, Reno had gone hard: he was barely walking by the time their downplate dive bar of choice kicked them to the curb (insert one’s preferred rant about _'anti-Shinra snobbery'_ here) and probably would have given up his keycard no matter what line Rude fed him.

The giggle Reno had made at Rude's suggestion he _'take care of his senior officer'_ was worth it, though.

"Ruuuude." Reno's fingers found the elbow of his partner's jacket and hung there for a moment. "Rude Lewd Boy. You gonna make my night for me, or what?"

He probably could, at that. Just climb into his partner's bed, pluck open the last buttons on his shirt, and finish what they'd started in the office that Wednesday. They'd both enjoy it, and Reno wouldn't even think of it as being taken advantage of.

But it wouldn't sit right with Rude. His thoughts about Reno were still a mess -- what he wanted out of him, who he actually saw him as -- and a bit of drunken sex wouldn't clarify any of it. He gently pried his partner's hand free from his sleeve and eased it down onto the mattress instead.

"You should get some sleep," he told him.

Reno didn't give up easily. He fought the pressure around his wrist and made little grabby-hand motions in the direction of Rude's knee, not enough motor coordination to insinuate the rest of his body over.

"C'monnnn, jus' lemme touch it. You're not th' only one who was... checkin' somebody out in the showers..."

True, Reno had been less than subtle the first time he saw him in the locker room. But Rude got that reaction from most guys, and very few of them were interested in sleeping with him. The notion that maybe Reno had been attracted to him before all this bullshit with Corneo was... interesting.

Rude stowed that thought for later.

"I gotta get going," he said, moving out of arm's reach as deftly as the drinks in his system would allow. He focused on standing for a moment and then started making his way toward the door.

Reno rolled languidly onto his side, watching his partner with half-lidded eyes. His eyeliner had smudged a bit on their ride home, making him look even more exhausted than Rude knew he was. And a bit like he'd been crying.

"Tseng told ya to stay, right?" he asked, sounding petulant.

Rude hesitated a few steps from the door. Why _had_ Tseng given him that instruction, anyway, and at what point in the evening had Reno figured it out?

"...He said, if I 'could manage,'" Rude said, not trusting himself to check back over his shoulder. "And I can't."

Reno fell silent, and Rude couldn't tell if it was resigned or accusatory. Maybe he'd finally drifted off.

That last theory proved incorrect. Rude was a half-step from the door's motion sensor when Reno spoke up again. His voice still lingered on the edge of sleep, but it had a certain clarity to it, like he was emerging from a dream instead of falling into one.

"Rude," Reno said. "Y'really gonna help me get 'im?"

_'You really going to help me kill one of the only people in Midgar we're not supposed to touch?'_

"Yeah, partner," Rude said. Saying that word now felt a lot more intimate than fucking ever could. "We'll get him."

* * *

How to assassinate someone for fun and profit:

  * **Establish an alibi.**



If the point was just to kill Don Corneo, Reno and Rude could walk right through the front doors of his mansion and do that today, but not if they planned on having jobs tomorrow. The best option would be to wait until they had an assignment out of town.

"That won't work if somebody IDs us," Rude said, looking very pointedly at Reno's hair.

Reno touched his gelled spikes defensively. Whatever cheapo dye he was using was getting even worse these days, more pinkish-orange than red. "I'll wear a hat or something," he protested.

"Just dye it. You'd be doing everybody a favor."

"You don't think Tseng's gonna find it a _little_ suspicious when I come back from a mission sporting a fresh coat of paint?"

That was a good point, but-- "Just make it a real good hat."

"Oh, I'll be bustin' out the fanciest for you, milady."

  * **Ensure the target's location.**



Corneo rarely left Wall Market unless it was to attend some VIP event topside, but guaranteeing he would be where they needed him to be, and at the correct time, was important.

"The coliseum."

"Yeah?"

"Corneo's in deep over it. He's losing a lot of business to the cabarets."

"You mean like the Honeybee Inn?" Reno asked idly.

Rude wavered for a moment on whether to press on Reno's apparent knowledge of Wall Market's newest and most expensive club, but decided to let it slide. "Yeah, that one. He's got other joints he's a part owner in, but Honeybee's Rhodea's show, and he's not sharing."

"Not that that stops Corneo from being an A-list regular, I bet."

"Right."

"So, what, one of us sneaks in as a dancer, the other as a bouncer? I call bouncer."

"Or we could drum up business for the coliseum, lure him somewhere his guard’ll be down."

"Or we could do that," Reno allowed, "if we felt like being boring."

"He's got a private box at the arena," Rude persisted, refusing to get sidetracked. "And it's a lot more private than whatever the Honeybee's got."

  * **Stage a compelling narrative.**



The don had no shortage of local enemies, most of whom lacked the political awareness to consider whether Corneo was better alive than dead. A few props to scatter around the site would be all they'd need.

"I dunno about fingering one of his competitors," Reno said, fiddling with his truncheon. Doing something with his hands was just how he avoided bolting out of his chair and bouncing off the walls like a trapped bird during meetings. "Shit could go from bad to worse if this ends up in a turf war. I say we make it look like his own guys pulled the trigger."

This actually did not preclude the possibility of a war, Wall Market being full of opportunistic petty lords just waiting for the don to fall. But if the hit appeared to come from within Corneo's own ranks, that battle for succession had at least a chance of not spilling out into the rest of the neighborhood.

"Who's second in command right now?" Reno asked.

"Guy called Dimitri."

Reno's fingers stilled for a moment. "Yeah. I remember him."

Inwardly, Rude winced. He still had no idea what Reno had been through during his time in Corneo's mansion, but he'd heard stories about the other "brides," or more precisely the failed bridal candidates, and what the don's men did to them. It wasn't pretty stuff.

So, no questions about who their fall guy was, then.

  * **Set up the escape route in advance.**



They could rely on their respective times in Wall Market to help with this, but it never hurt to figure out a few contingency plans, in case they had to go to ground.

"You got anyone in the market you're still friendly with?" Reno asked.

 _Plenty,_ Rude thought, but few he wouldn't expect to immediately rat him out for 10 gil or a selfie. "No," he said. "You?"

"Nah... Well." Reno canted his head to one side in thought. "I guess there's my dad."

"Your what?"

"Not the real one, he's in fucking, Muspelheim or whatever," Reno said, waving a hand and studiously avoiding Rude's questioning look. "I mean my -- my drag father, you know, the guy who put me up when I was a dumb kid on the streets. He's a raging bitch but he's got his priorities right. He'd hide us in his basement till the heat-death of the universe if we asked him to."

That was good to know, but not what Rude's attention snagged on. "You're from Muspelheim?" he asked. There were country backwaters, and then there were... places like that. "Always figured you were Midgar born and bred."

"And I thought you mighta been from del Sol, but I didn't wanna be racist," Reno snapped. "Tseng's family's been here since before there even _was_ a Midgar and he still gets shit about the way that he looks. You really wanna play this game?"

Rude held up his hands. He did not.

  * **Cover your tracks.**



Don't talk about it at the office, don't talk about it over the phone, case every meeting location in advance. And never, ever leave a paper trail.

"That one should come easy to you," Rude observed.

"Yeah, bust my balls about that some more, I might actually grow a pair." Reno leaned back in his armchair and lit a fresh cigarette, allowing it to hang from his lips after the first drag. "I didn't get into this line of work to sit at a desk all day."

At least they could see the surface of their desk lately. Reno was even starting to pull his own weight on the paperwork here and there. But at that particular moment they were speaking in a chintzy downplate hotel room, the type that rented by the hour and only didn't have wiretaps and cameras in the ceiling because just turning on the bathroom light overloaded the circuit breakers. The lady at check-in had assumed they were a couple and Reno had been all too happy to play up that cover story.

But even he hadn't suggested sex once they got to the room. The bed was more flea than mattress. Rude wasn't so sure about the chairs either.

"Then why did you swear up?" he asked.

Reno tapped his ashes straight onto the floor. All the previous occupants had. "Me? I'm in it for the health plan."

"Be serious."

"I _am_ serious. You know how much it costs to get decent top surgery as a private citizen?" Reno stuck his cigarette between his knuckles and used both hands to jiggle his breasts through his shirt, just to see if he could make Rude uncomfortable. It worked. "I'm a race car born in the body of a fucking family sedan. If I don't fix myself up, who else is gonna do it?"

Rude's lips parted, the words _'But you don't need fixing'_ on the tip of his tongue. He quashed them down again. In addition to being sentimental bullshit, it wasn't really his call to make, now was it?

Instead he said, "There's got to be something else."

"Nope," Reno said, popping the 'P.'

He wasn't even trying to sound convincing. It just wasn't information he felt Rude was entitled to yet, which was fair enough.

Rude checked the time. "Hour's nearly up," he said. Even if they were committing to this bit about using their lunch hour to have a clandestine affair in Midgar's shittiest love hotel, they'd be expected back at HQ soon. "We set for tomorrow?"

"Got us tickets on the first flight out of Midgar International," Reno answered, with a flourish and a tip of his head. "And tickets paid in cash for the chartered plane we're _actually_ going to be on the next day."

Rude nodded. Good. That was all good. "Corneo's just announced tomorrow night's prize pool," he said. "Five hundred thousand gil to first place."

"Nice. We're only going as far as the semis, though, remember?"

"'We'?"

Reno snickered. "Yeah, you're right, that's all _your_ show, buddy."

Rude just let him have that one. It was easier. "Make sure you can get us a straight shot to the box," he said instead. "We don't want any extra bodies."

"Hey, I'm a professional. You draw out the pig, I'll get us a way into his pen."

* * *

Rude wanted to say it felt like shit, being back here again. But he'd be lying. The concrete floors, the air thick with sweat and electricity, the ear-splitting crowds: it felt like coming home.

It was a bit different this time, obviously. The full-head mask took the edge off the noise, dampening the announcers' voices to merely a punch to the solar plexus rather than a concussive shock to the skull. He was swimming in the fucking suit, a riot of bargain shelf lycra sewn together in some green-orange design that was supposed to evoke flames or waves or something. The cape was the worst of it. He really wished Reno hadn't talked him into the cape.

"And in this corner!" one of the twin MCs shouted, his voice banging against the concrete and steel dome of the arena through means mechanical or materia, Rude had never figured that out. "The masked invader who's taken the coliseum by storm!"

"Who is he?" chimed in the other. "What does he want, and where is he going? Wherever it is, don't be caught standing in his way!"

"The mean green terror from beyond the stars! You know him, you love him! It's the Caped Comet!"

The crowd bellowed. Rude flexed. He'd never been the type to work the audience before, but anything that drew more attention to him right now played to his and Reno's advantage. Every pose he stuck drew another orgiastic squeal from the stands. Popped chocobeans rained down into the arena like confetti, a tribute to some dumbass backstory detail the MCs had invented, something about his character being a space alien enamored with human snack foods. Who even knew. 

On the other side of the arena stood the kind of small fry they always sent in first to warm up the crowd, some lanky teenager with a mop of unadvisable long hair and biceps thinner than Rude's wrists. The worried, wet-eyed look the kid was giving him said everything about his awareness of the situation.

Rudolfo the middleweight champion would've tried to go easy on the guy, but the Caped Comet didn't have that option. At that very moment Reno was wending his way through maintenance corridors, sabotaging electrics, getting eyes on the don. The bigger the spectacle Rude could make, the better.

The buzzer had barely sounded when Rude's fist slammed straight into the kid's teeth.

"Ooh! And another dirty first foray by the Caped Comet! He is _not_ in a playing mood today!"

"When is he ever?"

"The nastiest unarmed fighter this arena's seen in a long, long time! They say 'give a man a mask and he'll tell you the truth,' and fellas, the truth hurts!"

The color commentary landed like so many drops of rain; a distant distraction. Rude delivered a swift gut punch, let the kid wobble for a moment, then roundhoused him to the ground.

"Oh! Oh! Here it is! Are we going to see it?"

"The Caped Comet's signature move!"

He bent, and caught both the kid's legs below the knee, hoisting his lower body aloft as he swung into a spin.

"There! It! Is!"

"The Galactic Swing!"

"Caped Comet is showing no mercy for this newcomer!"

It was the most undignified thing Rude had done in his life, by a significant margin. At least he had a mask on.

* * *

Rude checked his burner phone in the dressing room after the quarter-final and found a text from an unregistered number:

_'pigs in the pen'_

That would be Reno, letting him know that Corneo was in his box seat, just as they'd anticipated.

 _'ok,'_ Rude texted back. Then he set the phone on the concrete floor, stomped it with his heel, and stashed the pieces at the bottom of a garbage can.

This was when things really got dicey. Ordinary spectators wouldn't be able to tell one competitor's fighting style from another, but now that the brackets had thinned out there was a real chance Corneo would ID him when he was in the ring, even through the costume and theatrics.

Rude toweled at some of the blood that had trickled down past his jaw. The inside of the mask was sticking to the side of his face, dried and crusty patches pulling at his skin every time he turned his head. His left ear wouldn't stop ringing.

He felt good, he realized, in spite of it all. His body felt like somebody'd switched out the filter on his veins: everything was cleaner, looser, like he'd just wolfed down a full plate of sinus-clearing hot curry or had some amazing sex. His muscles and nerves flowed together effortlessly, in a way they hadn't since he took the Shinra job. Even his blood tasted fresher on his tongue.

There was a brisk knock on the door, followed by the voice of a staff member, muffled and tinny. "Caped Comet, you're up!"

Rude really wished he'd at least been consulted about the name.

He flexed his taped knuckles and got to his feet, tugged the mask to fix the eye holes. The equipment stashed under his bulging costume shoulder pads rattled. Weapons weren't against the rules in the coliseum, but these weren't for the match. They were for what came after.

Outside the dressing room, the gifts and artificial flowers had piled up even higher than before. Giant plastic bouquets, hand-painted banners, big bags of popped chocobeans sent over by fans to cheer on Wall Market's new favorite masked brawler, or at least the idea of him they'd invented in their heads.

Rude almost felt a bit sorry for them. Win or lose, they were about to see the Caped Comet's last ever performance.

The stands, when he stepped out into the arena, erupted in a roar so deafening that nothing in Rude's actual coliseum career could compare. It hit his entire body at once like a high-pressure wave, sent electricity crackling through his joints.

"The man of the hour!" one of the MCs crowed, his voice just a background patter beneath the cheers. "The favorite to win tonight’s grand title! It's the Caped! Comet!"

"He's crushed everyone in his path to get this far, folks! And he's not done, oh no! Can his meteoric rise ever be stopped?!"

"He's about to face his toughest opposition yet! A true veteran of the slaughterhouse floor, the only grappler to ever go toe-to-toe with the legendary Rudolfo and fight him to a standstill!"

Ice water swept through Rude's veins. He didn't hear the name the announcer called; static was already filling his ears, crowding out all traces of sound, leaving just the underwater reverberation of the inside of his skull. On the far side of the ring, the gate leading to the other challenger's galley began to rise.

Steel-toed boots. Battle-worn knee guards and bracers. The industrial chain worn draped over his bear-sized torso. The long, shaggy mane fringing his thinning scalp, like his hair hadn't grown out so much as slide downward. 

It was the Dragon.

Not _a_ dragon. Rude had punched plenty of lower-d dragons since joining the Turks; they were more a nuisance than a threat, the kind of low-grade pest that liked to hang out around remote reactors and suck up the mako runoff till they grew too gigantic to fly. But _the_ Dragon was a problem. 

He stepped into the center of the arena, lopsided grin showing his mangled teeth. More than half had been replaced by this point, some in steel, some ceramic. He drew his boulder-sized fists together like he was adjusting boxing gloves, bumped his massive, gnarled knuckles against each other so hard they might've given off sparks.

Rude was a big guy, but he could've hollowed the Dragon out and worn him like a suit, if he could manage to get through that solid wall of muscle first. He'd never actually lost to him in the arena, but he'd never actually won, either. And there was an even bigger problem.

The guy was fucking nice.

"Hey, buddy," the Dragon said amiably, just as Rude's hearing started to return. "I know you got the whole character bit going on, but let's have a clean fight, yeah?"

Replying was out of the question, even if it weren't part of the persona. Rude went into a stance. His shoulder pieces suddenly felt flimsy and loose, his cape dragging down his back like it weighed a good 50 kilos.

"Ah, that's how it is, huh," the Dragon sighed, dropping his fists to his sides. "Well, you do what you gotta do and I'll do what I gotta do."

The buzzer rang.

Rude sprang back, light on the balls of his feet, whipping just out of reach to avoid the oncoming wrecking ball of the Dragon's fist. A collective _'ooh'_ rose up from the crowd. He feinted right, missed his timing, got clipped on the elbow as he cancelled into a roll, an ice-shock of pain shooting through his arm.

"Surprising defensive play from the Caped Comet!" one of the twin MCs exclaimed. "Looks like the Dragon's already rattling his nerves."

"It's a smart move; it shows our mean green menace has done his homework," said the other. "But it looks like his reaction time's just a touch too slow to deal with the Dragon's Viper Punch!"

Rude recovered from the roll, flexed his arm to unlock his aching elbow as he backed up and put a little more space between them. Useless maneuver, there was no running out the clock in a match like this, but he had to think, organize his strategy. The Caped Comet's theatrics were useless against a brawler like this; there was no room for that kind of showboating. But if he went in with his normal style he'd give himself away immediately.

The Dragon started coming in on his left, no doubt noticing Rude was listing on that side. Rude side-stepped and the two of them began to circle, sizing each other up for an opening. The Dragon struck fist, closing the distance between them in a snap with a haymaker aimed at Rude's left ear. He ducked at the last second, the world spinning around him as his center of gravity wobbled, but he quickly went into a crouch, weight planted on his arms and sweeping a leg at the least-armored portion of the Dragon's ankle.

"Ooof! Now that's a return to form for the Caped Comet!" cried one of the MCs, as Rude's boot hooked the Dragon's leg around the back of his heel tendon and upended him right on his ass. "Using the Dragon's size against him and bringing him down to his level!"

"The bigger they are, the harder they fall!"

With a smaller opponent, Rude could go in for a pin, maybe a classic wrestling hold, but the Dragon would knock him right aside if he tried that. He climbed up and went for a hair grab instead, pulling the Dragon's head up until he was bent nearly double, veins bulging along his tree trunk neck. The crowd howling in the stands, Rude swung his knee right between the Dragon's eyes, felt the cartilage and bone groaning and capillaries bursting. A gush of hot bright blood burst forth, soaking through the lycra of his suit leg.

The Dragon groaned, the pitiful noise burbling up through the mess of his face. Rude felt a twist of nausea in his guts. This was a middle-aged man he'd gone for drinks with, weightlifted with. Instinctively, he released his grip on his opponent's greasy tangles of hair.

With speed that didn't suit his size at all, the Dragon whipped up a hand and caught Rude's by the wrist, wrenching it violently until Rude felt the bones of his forearm creak. Jagged, sawtoothed pain clawed up through his arm. Reflexively, he fell to his knees, twisting in the direction of the rotation to lessen the strain and leaving him open for the Dragon to get his other hand around his elbow.

"Ooh! A sudden reversal from our coliseum veteran!" hollered one of the MCs, as Rude was thrown effortlessly onto his back, all the wind knocked from his lungs. "A magnificent toss even from a supine position!"

"Respect your elders, kids!"

"Caped Comet seems to be having a little trouble finding his feet. Is this the end of the invader's Wall Market reign?"

Rude got an arm beneath him, to start propping himself up on his elbow, but there was no strength to it. Resistance pulled at his back. The corner of the damn cape had gotten stuck beneath his own hand.

Then, suddenly, he was being lifted, a noose of solid muscle wrapped around his throat. The Dragon hefted him upright until his feet only barely grazed the floor, his full weight swinging from the base of his skull like a sack-cloth doll, windpipe compressed into nonexistence.

Rude beat a fist uselessly against the Dragon's forearm. The ringing in his left ear had become an intermittent screech, a death-knell siren in his skull, his pulse thudding slower and slower as it marched toward leaden defeat.

"Rudy," the Dragon was murmuring close to his good ear, voice thick with clotting blood. "I know that's you under there. Dunno why you came back, but m'glad we finna got to settle things..."

A chant was starting up among the crowd, off-rhythm with the pounding in Rude's head. Cold was beginning to seep through his extremities, the lack of oxygen shutting his body down by degrees.

"You're a good kid," the Dragon continued. "Better'n this hole deserves. But I got my own kids to look after, Rudy. I got grandkids."

The play-by-play by the MCs was growing frenzied, unhinged. But the chant from the crowd was still drowning them out.

_"Mask! Mask! Mask! Mask!"_

"I ain't got many fights left in me," the Dragon said. "I need this one. It's nothin' personal."

_"Mask! Mask! Mask! Mask!"_

Rude felt a tugging at his scalp, felt the dried blood fusing the inside of the mask to his cheek start to peel away. The narrow eye holes slid up away from his eyes and blacked out his already-tunnelling vision.

But the greasy damp air of the coliseum never hit his face. A moment later, he was being lifted again, the constriction leaving his throat as the Dragon flipped him sideways. Blinded, held aloft like a sacrificial offering, the only sensation Rude registered was the vertigo of the sudden drop, and the sharp, sick pain through the center of his spine as the Dragon slammed him over his knee.

* * *

Rude came to lying on a hard bench, the medicinal burn of healing materia tickling the roof of his mouth.

He lifted a spasming hand to his face, felt the blood-stuck rubber of the mask. A sliver of relief. He tugged the face holes down so that he could see out of them, found the nondescript poured-cement ceiling of a competitor dressing room. Not his own.

On the third attempt, he managed to prop himself up on his elbows. His spine screamed at him in protest, but at least it seemed to still be intact.

"Morning, sunshine." The Dragon was seated on the edge of a table at the other end of the room, redoing the tape on his knuckles. "How's the back?"

Rude finally organized his arm into bending back and rubbed a tentative hand over the radiating black hole of pain it found there. "Never better," he grunted. There were a lot of questions poised on his tongue just then, but he went with: "How long was I out?"

"Few minutes. Crowd's still going nutso out there," the Dragon said, jutting his shovel-sized chin in the direction of the arena gate. "Figured you might wanna go out the back way."

Rude touched a hand to his shoulder, found the bulky armor still there, with its contraband contents. He immediately started to detach them and open everything up.

"Can't leave yet," he said. "Got a job to do."

"Shinra pay so bad you gotta take side gigs?" The Dragon looked over in time to see the 'equipment' Rude was unpacking, the disassembled black steel of a 9mm, the stun gun, the pocket knife with the custom filigree handle and a cursive 'D' etched into it. "What the hell?"

Rude reached back and got a fistful of his cape fabric, pulling until it tore at the shoulder seams. He knotted it into a kind of sash and stuck his gear inside it, scanning the walls of the dressing room. After a moment he spotted it: the ventilation grate above the vending machine. Hopefully Reno hadn't been kept waiting too long. They had at best 15 minutes before the final match was scheduled to start.

"Thanks for the help," Rude said, hoisting himself up onto the dust-caked top of the machine. The grate looked like it would need a tool to come loose, but he didn't have the time to fuss with it. He punched it inward instead, and the criss-crossed bars gave way like wet paper.

"I don't want no part in this," the Dragon said warily. "You got business with the don, I'll give ya five minutes, but after that..."

Rude nodded. It was more than he might've expected. He reached up and finally peeled off the mask, dark rosettes of bruises and dried blood covering the left side of his numb and stinging face.

"Look out for those grandkids," he said.

Even minus the shoulder pads, the duct was a squeeze. It didn’t help that half his body felt like raw hamburger held together with a single rubbery tendon and moved just about as gracefully. But he didn't need to follow it far. Inside of two minutes he found an opening that dropped him out into the service corridor, the long narrow hallway that ran the circumference of the coliseum. It wasn't much brighter than the vent: the overhead lamps were dead, casting the deserted corridor in the sickly yellow pallor of the emergency lights. Yet more fine prep work from his partner. 

Following it in either direction would eventually link him up with where he was supposed to be, but 'eventually' wasn't optimal in this situation. He stuck two fingers in his mouth and whistled.

The noise bounced off the cement walls and receded into silence. He waited. After a few seconds, he heard a faint response whistle coming from somewhere to his left.

He broke into a jog in that direction, piecing the glock back together as he ran. 

Reno met him running in the opposite direction, stealth suit covered in four kinds of filth and a knit black cap pulled down around his ears. "Holy shit, you’re a mess," he told Rude without any trace of irony. He unzipped the front of his suit and handed over the wrinkled but clean work shirt he’d stuffed in there, plus Rude’s black leather gloves. "What'd you do, go and lose?"

"Yeah," Rude grunted. He passed Reno the bundled cape containing the reassembled gun and the knife they'd lifted off Dimitri, keeping the stun gun for himself. Scanners would've pinged any weapons if Reno had tried to smuggle them in through the maintenance shaft, but in the usual backwards logic of the coliseum, no such safety precautions applied to competitors. "Ran into an old friend."

"He ID you?"

"Yeah, but he's giving us a head start."

Reno stuck the gun into his utility belt loop and the knife in a pocket. Normally on jobs he wore fingerless gloves, but he'd swapped them for a proper pair like Rude's this time, on the off-chance somebody tried getting clever with forensics. He peeled the upper half of the stealth suit to his waist, exposing a sweat-damp tank top which stuck to his chest in places that made Rude grateful the light was so bad in here.

"I got security responding to a little electrical fire on the ground floor; should keep us clear for a few more minutes," Reno said, slowing as they reached a maintenance ladder indistinguishable from the countless others they had passed. This one let out into an elevator shaft, where an empty car was already waiting for them. They hadn't yet passed a single other human being, which suggested Reno had made good on his word to minimize the body count. "Punch the star button, will ya?"

It was the sort of service elevator seen in some old hotels, and the star button looked like it ought to connect to a presidential suite, with a card slot above it awaiting user validation. But the car lifted the moment Rude pressed it, rusted gears grinding noisily to life as they ascended.

"You hacked this without tools?" Rude asked, surprised.

"Damn right," Reno said. "Five minutes in the security office was all it took. Even got a chance to catch you on the live feed getting your ass beat by that old lady in the second round."

"She wasn't a--"

The elevator car groaned and lurched to a premature halt. Reno tsked and swung his boot straight into the control panel, a vomit of sparks and spirals of smoke bursting from the metal plating like very unfun confetti.

Rude arched an eyebrow at Reno as the car resumed upward.

"Okay, so maybe I missed a few failsafes," Reno said, spreading his hands. "Your ass was _very_ distracting."

Reno reached up and pulled the black knit cap from his head, wild hair a bloody sunset red under the car's dim halogen lights. He combed his fingers through it, restoring some of its usual organized chaos, and then straightened the straps on his tank top.

"How do I look?" he asked.

Rude looked him up and down. The light in the elevator was better than where they'd just come from, but not by much. Reno was sweaty and dirty, looking like a half-dressed, horny car mechanic with manic burnout hair and a serial killer grin. Every muscle taut as a violin string, impossibly young no matter what his age actually was. Beautiful.

"Fine," Rude said, at a loss.

Reno rolled his eyes. Not the right answer, apparently.

There was no customer-friendly _'ding'_ when the elevator reached the VIP level, just a hum as the car slid to a stop. Rude pulled back the iron gate and Reno charged out ahead without hesitation, leaving his partner to hurry and bring up the rear.

They met one lost security guard right outside the door leading to Corneo's private box, the susurrations of the arena crowd on the other side of the door covering the footfalls of their approach until Rude was near enough to hit her with the stun gun. It was a poor substitute for Reno's truncheon, but it did the job.

Guard dealt with and dragged harmlessly over into a corner, the Turks took up position on either side of the door, Rude with the stun gun and his hand on the doorknob, Reno with Dimitri's stolen glock held police-style in a two-handed grip.

Rude tested the doorknob. It wasn't locked.

This was it. On the other side of the door was Don Corneo. The man who, in different ways, had contaminated both their lives. There was a high chance he wouldn't be alone, and if that was the case, Reno and Rude would have maybe a split second to assess how much collateral damage was worth their reckless little vendetta.

Rude met Reno's gaze, those pale pilot light eyes, the spark before an explosion. And, fuck, there was that feeling in the pit of Rude's stomach again, the one he really didn't want to have to put a name to.

They exchanged a nod. Rude swung the door open.

The box was dark, the only light coming from the blazing arena down below, outlining the sharp silhouettes of three ornate, high-backed chairs. Reno dove toward the left, bent low with his gun tucked to his chest. Rude took the right, sweeping in and hugging the wall around the side, until he came to the corner of an armrest, stun gun crackling at his hip.

The chair was vacant. So was the other one on Reno's side. In the middle chair, the largest and elevated above the other two, sat Don Corneo.

The don had the decency to yelp, bag of popped chocobeans spraying down his front as he jumped in his seat. He swung his head from side to side, registered Rude immediately, and tried to shrink in on himself like a fleshy softshell turtle, quivering.

"Rudy!" Corneo cried, pleaded, and only then seemed to notice the presence at his left shoulder, eyes sliding up from Reno's waist to his tits, and from there to his slender foxlike face twisted up in hatred. "Oh, um, is this, one of your new co-workers--?"

Reno hissed, his lips pulled back into a snarl. "Don't act like you don't remember, you shitweasel fuck."

Corneo whimpered, curling into a ball with his hands raised in surrender or pitiful self-defense. But there really was no recognition there, no suggestion he had any idea who Reno was.

No memory of one of his own victims.

Before Rude could intervene, Reno was launching himself at Corneo, swinging his stolen gun into the don's face. The first blow gouged a deep purple wound in Corneo's forehead, the second lanced his eye, the third knocked in two of his teeth.

"Reno!" Rude shouted, too late. His partner had grabbed hold of Corneo by his greasy yellow combover and yanked his head back, shoving the barrel of Dimitri's gun into the corner of his jaw.

"How's your memory now?" Reno demanded, planting a boot on the edge of Corneo's chair, right between his thighs. The don let out a shuddering whimper. "You remembering better? Huh? Remember the dumb little _'blonde dyke'_ you drugged up and fucked?"

Corneo gibbered. Apparently that didn't narrow things down much.

Rude stepped in, getting an arm around Reno's chest to start urging him back. "This wasn't the plan," he said, a rumbling in his partner's ear. "We get in, we get out."

Reno's jaw worked, chewing his tongue raw, eyes alive like fireworks. "He knows. He's just bullshitting. The motherfucker knows."

Vibrating with fury, swallowing back blood and spit, Reno was barely holding back the rising panic in his voice. It was destabilizing him, upending some internal cosmic order Rude had only glimpsed up to then -- the realization that someone who had fucked up his life so catastrophically didn't even consider him a footnote in his own.

Just one face in a stack of photos.

"Forget it, Reno." Rude gripped his shoulder insistently, felt Reno's slighter frame shivering, like a spring wound to breaking point. "We're out of time. Finish it."

He'd do whatever Reno needed from him after this. Hole up in whatever dive bar he wanted and drink their livers black, or find a hotel and fuck him until he couldn’t think. Whatever it took to close the book on this that Reno wasn't getting from Corneo. They just couldn't stick around _here_ , with a building full of armed thugs about to come down on their heads.

"...Hee."

Rude looked down. Corneo, still shrinking into the upholstery, had moved a hand to the back of his arm rest, his stubby fingers drifting over a section of the paneling he had flipped up to reveal a slim black control panel.

"Tell me," the don said. "Why do you think someone would let two disobedient little tin soldiers run roughshod over his kingdom, seize his books, wreck his very legitimate business operations?"

Rude tightened his arm around Reno, redoubling his efforts to pull him back.

"Is it:

  * A) 'Because he's ready to die'?"
  * B) 'Because he's certain he'll win'?
  * C) 'Because he's clueless'?"



Reno raised the gun, slipped his finger inside the trigger guard.

Below them, the low roar of the crowds ignited with the concussive force of a bomb, shouts and screams reverberating and multiplying through the cement and steel dome. The Dragon had just won his last tournament.

"Give up?" Corneo shouted, raising his voice to compete against the tidal crash of cheers and falling far short. "It's..."

Rude didn't catch the answer. Corneo had pressed some yellow button on his control panel, and suddenly everything around them was falling.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter warnings:
> 
> -Drugging.  
> -Nonconsensual groping.

This time, it took a while for Rude's consciousness to surface. He became aware of his body in stages, the syrupy drag of his head, the ten-ton weight bearing down on his neck. Lying prone on an unfamiliar floor, forehead and chest pressed into slimy, ancient masonry, the ripe smell of sewage in his nose.

Rude tried to unfold his arms from behind his back and found that he couldn't. Thick industrial ropes had been wound around his wrists and his upper arms. He tested his legs -- those were free, but sluggish, like the signals from his brain were taking the scenic route on the way to his lower body. Even when he managed to get a foot planted, it slid out from under him, slipping on the wet film covering the crumbling brickwork.

"Oh now I remember this one!"

Rude lifted his head, or tried to. It was more than the awkward position; everything in his body was on a time-delay, hot static pressing on his brain.

"Heehee! I see you've gone and filled out a little, at least where it counts."

Corneo was kneeling just a few feet away with his back to Rude, bent over a similarly tied-up Reno, who thankfully still seemed to be knocked out. The don had lifted away his tank top and leaned in closer to admire his breasts, cupping and squeezing them like he was appraising a couple pieces of fruit.

Rude felt bile rising to the back of his throat. "Stop--"

Corneo released his hands, giving the side of one breast one last, playful spank before straightening up to look over at his other project. "Rudy!" he exclaimed, all smiles just as he had been back at the mansion. "You've been a very bad little boy, haven't you? But you're still great for business."

He got to his feet, dark patches on his mustard beige slacks where scum and mildew had seeped into the fabric. His face was a mess of beaten flesh, his right eye nearly swollen shut, a crust of dried blood over his shiny forehead. But he seemed entirely unfazed, humming to himself as he drifted over toward a desk.

This appeared to be some sort of panic room. Rude didn't know if it was located directly under the coliseum or Corneo had dragged him and Reno here after dropping them down his trap door. On the far side was an antique security monitoring system, dotted with analog switches and crowned with an array of squat cathode ray tube monitors, each glowing with the silvery black-and-white image of some security feed. Some of the high-angle views were familiar -- the coliseum lobby, the front gate outside Corneo's mansion -- but most were unknown to Rude, showing cramped windowless cellars and empty loading docks; a ceiling view of a gaudy love hotel room.

The adjacent desk, which Corneo was now perusing, was stacked high with papers and accounting binders, cigar boxes and old tournament promotions, some of them already disintegrating in the damp. As he opened a drawer, something glass and cylindrical rolled into his view, and his face lit up like a jolly solstice elf.

"Heeeere we go!"

A chill prickled along Rude's back. It was a long, narrow cartridge, a glass tube with a plastic plunger and recessed needle, like an epinephrine injector, or an adrenaline shot. Corneo held it in his soft fist as he sauntered back toward his captives, crouching this time beside Rude's head.

"You've really hurt my feelings, Rudy," the don said conversationally, as Rude pulled again at his restraints. The knots couldn't have been very sophisticated, but Corneo had used a significant amount of rope. "I could've milked a few more years out of you before I had to send you upriver. But instead you go running away topside to be a _big-time grown-up Shinra boy_ , leaving me with an empty coliseum. That's not a very respectful way to repay your dear old uncle, now is it?"

He fiddled with the syringe between his fore- and middle fingers, twirling it over his knuckles like a fountain pen.

"And then you came back and started sticking your finger into pies you weren't asked to, ruining my perfect little system! All for these used goods here." He regarded Reno over his shoulder, froglike smile stretching even wider as the redhead started to groan and stir. "I ought to file a complaint with your bosses. Let them know what a pair of ungrateful little leeches they have on the payroll... But I thought of something even better."

Corneo moved over to Reno again, grabbing a cruel fistful of his hair to pull him up into a seated position, his whole body still limp as a rag doll. He tilted Reno's head until it dropped onto a shoulder, revealing the pale expanse of his throat.

"If I can't have you on my team, Rudy baby, it's only fair that Shinra doesn't get you either," Corneo went on, lining the syringe up with a prominent vein in Reno's neck. "As thanks for bringing in the cash tonight, I'll let the two of you stay down here until you're nice and ripe, then feed your bodies to my new puppy. You _were_ curious to see just what I'd been doing with the rest of the coliseum leftovers. And in the meantime, I thought I'd give you a little show."

His thumb pressed the plunger, which automatically depressed with a soft hiss. The vial started to empty.

"This is probably too much," the don said cheerfully, as Reno shuddered and tried to squirm away from the needle in his throat. His eyelids fluttered, dragged to the edge of consciousness as whatever was in the syringe started its march through his veins. "But it's expired, so I'm sure doubling the dose is fine for such a good little whore."

"Corneo," Rude pleaded, past the threshold of shame now. "Uncle..."

"I don't think you ought to be calling me that anymore, Rudy baby." Corneo tossed the depleted syringe aside and straightened up again, patting Reno softly on one clammy cheek. Reno swayed and bent forward, eyes cloudy, legs clenching together as his breathing grew labored. The don cooed. "Do you like that, sweetheart? You loved it when I gave it to you last time. We played all night, didn't we?"

Rude muscled his way up onto an elbow, boots finally catching enough traction to help him sit up. "Get away from him," he warned.

"Wish I could stay to watch," Corneo went on, oblivious or ignoring him, "but it's about time I made an appearance upstairs. There's a new champ who needs his prize money! And I have my own to collect, of course."

"Corneo!" The shout cracked into pieces as it left Rude's throat, tumbling from his mouth in useless fragments. He pulled at his restraints, dragged and contorted his legs underneath him to force himself up onto his knees. The don was already skipping toward the door.

Beside Rude, Reno collapsed onto his side, his breath coming in strained, moaning gasps as sweat and tears streamed down his face. He kept clenching his thighs together, squirming his hips, a feverish heat building through his body he couldn't get rid of.

Rude's mind flashed on the long list of chemical names he'd skimmed in Rufus Shinra's toxicology report. Who knew what an expired double dose of some of that shit would do? He gave up climbing to his feet and dropped down next to Reno instead, getting a knee beneath his head to try keeping it elevated.

"Reno," he urged, watching his partner's normally pale skin flushed to a deep pink, his eyes glazed over and lost. No recognition, no response. _Damn it--_

The knife. Corneo had taken away the stun gun and glock they had been carrying but Reno was still wearing the stealth suit, would still have Dimitri's knife folded up in his pocket. Turning himself around, Rude backed up against Reno's side and sought around with his bound hands until they found the pocket at Reno's hip. He dug until his fingers touched on something hard and metal.

It took almost a minute for Rude to successfully fish the knife out; several minutes more to unfold it and saw through the outer twine of his filth-caked ropes. Finally, the braid snapped; the tension in the rope went lax, and Rude had enough give to twist one of his hands free.

He made quick work of the rest of their bindings, but Reno was already deep within whatever bad trip he'd been sent on, pupils blown so wide that all the color in his eyes was gone. When Rude touched him, a shudder ran through the whole length of his body and he clawed his way into Rude's lap, pressed his curled-up form against Rude's chest like he might burrow right inside him if he could.

"Rude--" Reno's voice was tiny and helpless as a blind kitten, nothing at all like the hotheaded Turk that Rude knew.

"I'm here," Rude said.

"Please -- I need--"

His body was burning up, his thin tank top still rucked up above the curve of his breasts, nipples flushed dark and erect. He squirmed, unconsciously rubbing himself against Rude in an incoherent attempt at friction.

 _'You loved it when I gave it to you last time,'_ Corneo had said. _'We played all night, didn't we?'_

 _Great,_ Rude thought. Just what he needed.

He made to start sliding Reno off his lap, but Reno wasn't having it, clawing at the front of Rude's shirt and making more of those small pleading noises. Under other circumstances, this was the stuff of Rude's wildest wet dreams, but Reno was barely aware of what was happening, much less able to consent to any of it.

"Rude, _please,_ I'm--"

Reno pushed more insistently into Rude's space. He found his mouth, sucked at his lower lip until something broke in Rude and he let him in, sharp frenetic kisses giving way to warm tongues and Reno panting into his mouth, ecstatic sighs. Nothing like the time in their office when Reno had shoved himself on Rude just to prove a point, all spite and aggression -- here they were moving together, swept up in an inexorable wave of mutual feeling like it was the easiest, most natural thing in the world.

When Rude finally broke off to breathe, the room seemed to spin a little. He got out from his partner's arms and climbed to his feet, dumping Reno unceremoniously onto the damp floor.

"What the hell!" Reno yelled, seeming to surface out of the drug fugue long enough to feel offended.

"Sorry," said Rude, shucking off his work shirt. It was filthy and several sizes too big to be much use to Reno, but it beat the thin tank top he was wearing. Rude draped the shirt over Reno's shoulders like a shock blanket and went to check out the security console.

"Ruuuuude!" Behind him, Reno flopped down onto his back and whined, tossing side to side restlessly like his skin was on fire. It couldn't feel comfortable, having a drug like that in one's system, but Rude suspected Reno was being just slightly melodramatic about it. "Oh my _god_ if you don't fuck me I'm going to _die_."

"You're not going to die," Rude said, scanning the control panel for something that might open the giant vault door that was sealing them in. It was apparently asking too much for Corneo to occasionally label his annoying death traps. "Just try to sleep it off."

Reno made a noise somewhere between a put-upon teenager and a cat being pet in the wrong direction. Out of the corner of his eye, Rude saw him stick a hand down the front of his suit and start to rub himself off. Well, that was another way of dealing with the problem.

"Worst partner ever," Reno grumbled, and since he couldn't see it anyway, Rude allowed himself a small smile.

* * *

It wasn't a big plane, just four seats and the cockpit sectioned off behind a door, which was a sort of privacy Rude supposed he should feel glad to have.

Not an ideal situation, either, going straight from such a legendary fuckup to flying out for the away mission they were supposed to already be on. And a predawn red-eye too, because when you're playing hooky from work you don't really have the option to travel in style. At least they had the cabin to themselves.

Reno partook of the plane's "minibar" as soon as they were airborne, though the options were limited. Cheap whiskey, cheaper vodka, a couple room-temperature beers. He chose the whiskey. Rude didn't see any reason not to let him.

In the hours it had taken for Reno to sleep off the drug, Rude had gone through the boxes in Corneo's panic room and found folders, named and dated, all of them stuffed with photos and creepy little trophies Corneo had taken from his "brides" over the years: jewelry, locks of hair, panties, weirder shit even than that. He'd stacked them all up in a pile on the don's desk and set fire to it as they were leaving.

Reno's folder had been in there as well, under a name Rude didn't recognize and promptly pushed out of his mind. The first few photos were like the one he had seen in the don's office -- Reno cornered on the bed, looking small and terrified, Corneo climbing toward him. The rest were... more than Rude could stomach. He'd shredded the whole folder and stuffed it at the bottom of the pile as tinder.

Nothing in the documents offered any sort of clue as to how Reno had gotten out, how he'd survived when all the rest of Corneo's "brides" were never heard from again. Maybe it didn't matter. Or maybe Reno would tell him himself one day.

"Smells like shit," Reno said, from the vicinity of the floor. 

Rude sniffed his suit jacket. They'd showered and retrieved their spare clothes from a public locker before hitting the airport, but it wasn't unreasonable that some trace of the sewers still lingered on them, or that Reno's nose would be sensitive enough to pick it up.

"We'll clean up at the hotel," Rude said.

"Man..." Reno leaned back, lolling his head against a seat cushion, half-empty bottle of single malt resting against his inner thigh. "Sucks to be going straight back to work like this."

"Hm," Rude agreed.

"After your probation's up let's take some PTO and go to one of those Wutai-style hot springs or something."

"Hm."

"Wait, does your PTO accrue while you're...?" Reno trailed off, frowning and squinting at the roof of the plane. The math involved in calculating their paid leave was even more complex than the algorithm governing their solstice bonuses. No one in General Affairs ever had any idea how much time off they had and that was exactly how upper management liked it. "Whatever, point is, hot springs."

"Hm."

An exaggerated sigh. "Will you get down here and talk to me?"

The question stirred Rude out of the doze he hadn't realized he'd been falling into, staring out the cabin window at the uniform gray horizon. Neither of them had caught much sleep in the past 48 hours.

"I'm listening," he said.

"Come down anyway," Reno said. Before, if he'd said something like that, it would be in the tone of an order, senior officer to junior. But here he said it like a request. A plea.

It was a persuasive argument. Rude unclipped his seatbelt and settled down next to Reno on the slightly sticky floor of their rust bucket rent-a-plane.

"I've been thinking," Reno said. His shoulders were tense, even with the drink in him. "Maybe you should ask Tseng to reassign you."

Rude's eyebrows shot up. "Why?"

"'Cause I'm high drama all the fucking time and if you hang around me you'll just get pulled into that batshit orbit." He moved his finger in an ever-shrinking circle, an object going down the drain. "You're a good kid. You oughta have a partner that looks out for you."

"I'm older than you," Rude said.

"Nope," Reno said, popping the 'P.' Once again he declined to elaborate.

"And I like my current partner," Rude persisted.

"Someday you won't."

"'Someday' a lot of things could happen." Wars, plagues, the planet falling into the sun, their office going paperless. "I like where I am."

Reno scowled, switched tactics. "All the people in the department and you get paired with the one other headcase that came outta Wall Market. Doncha think Tseng's pulling a fast one?"

Rude thought back to that _'special assignment'_ Tseng had given him. The way he'd _'accidentally'_ assigned the Corneo case to the two Turks most likely to lose their cool around the don. Maybe it was all just the deputy director's way of dealing with a problem Veld and the brass wouldn't let him touch.

If so, they'd let him down. Corneo would live to rape another day, Wall Market was still a meat grinder for human lives, and Shinra was still buying its castoffs. All they had to show for all their planning was some lost sleep and a watermelon-sized bruise on Rude's back.

He said, "Maybe Tseng thought we'd understand each other."

Reno snorted. "Just two dumb kids who went looking for fame and got fucked in the ass instead, huh?"

Literal particulars aside, it really was a hell of a thing. Rude thought back to some of the dates he'd seen in Reno's file in the panic room. While he'd been on the south side of the market getting his teeth knocked loose in the coliseum, Reno had been just up the street running with Andrea Rhodea and his whole crowd, working at clubs and parlors, doing drag shows. There had been a thousand opportunities for their paths to intersect. They just hadn't.

"I was right there," Rude muttered. "I could've--"

"Don't say 'rescued me.' Goddammit, Rude."

"No. I mean I could've gotten to know you sooner."

Reno fell silent, leaving just the buzzing hum of the plane motors outside, the soft vibrations running through the floor beneath them.

"You wouldn't have liked me," he said finally, with a short, self-effacing laugh. "I was dumb as shit. Country hick listening to trash music and flaking on everybody who ever did him a favor. Couldn't even put my face on right."

"Not much has changed, then."

This earned Rude a punch in the shoulder, lighter than the ones Reno could throw when he meant it, but still kinda hard. Rude rubbed at the spot while Reno made a wheezy sort of chuckle beside him.

"You want some of this?" Reno asked, lifting the half-empty bottle.

"Pass." One of them had to be sober when they got to their destination; it might as well be Rude.

"More for me," Reno decided, with a tiny fleck of disappointment. Like there were going to be a shortage of opportunities for him to flirt over the coming week. He took a healthy swig and wiped his mouth with the cuff of his shirt sleeve, lips scraped blush-pink and softly swollen like he'd been doing something else with them.

Rude still didn't really know what to call this feeling. If he was just projecting his own stupid white knight bullshit onto someone who didn't actually exist, or if he was a parasite feasting on the details of Reno's trauma-that-he-wouldn't-call-trauma. Or maybe none of this was all that complicated at all: maybe he just liked Reno in all his Reno-ness, with all his lethal rough edges and hidden soft spots, and it was possible to want to protect someone without thinking they were weak.

It didn't seem like the right time, in any case. Not as in that very moment, on the floor of a second-rate charter plane, but in general -- just five months into knowing each other, still barely feeling out this partnership of theirs, coming off something which had reopened a lot of psychic wounds for both of them. Moving in like he could heal Reno with the power of his dick felt worse than predatory.

Besides, odds were that in a few weeks Reno would go back to his binge-drinking and random bar hookups and forget his partner even existed except as someone to do the paperwork. And then where would they be?

Next to him, Reno had gone quiet again, gently drifting sideways until his head had come to rest on Rude's shoulder. His breathing had turned slow and even. That was fine. At least one of them should try getting some sleep before they landed.

Rude stole a sideways glance anyway. In this position, he could see Reno's roots coming in, that dull brownish color some people called _'dishwater blond.'_ Rude never really understood why. Because it sounded rural and poor, probably.

He waited until Reno was well asleep and snoring softly to lift his hand and stroke a few fingers through it. The second they got back, Rude was going to find the fanciest, most expensive red dye in Midgar, the type they used in upscale salons or something, and do Reno's hair himself. If Reno wanted to go to a hot spring, they'd go to a hot spring. If he wanted to keep up this ass-backwards flirtation thing they had going, they'd figure it out as they went.

And, someday, when they finally got Corneo -- either because he finally lost the brass's favor or because an opportunity simply presented itself -- it was going to be immensely satisfying for both of them.

Beside him, Reno burbled in his sleep. It sounded like _‘best partner,’_ but it could as easily have been some shit like _‘no potato’_ and honestly, both possibilities were kinda endearing.

“Hm,” Rude agreed.

  
  


END

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! You can find me on Twitter @robotdere.


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